Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Ranto Part 2: Ye Olde Times

SUPER CIVILIZE ME

What was it that allowed human beings to congregate into cities? Well, as discussed in part 1 (circuitously), there needed to be a static and abundant food supply. Check that- a food surplus. If it's true that controlling an animal's food supply helps to tame their natural impulses, then the same could be said for humans- we became different once our food supply became controlled.

The second innovation came in the form of trade. With trade involved, different sectors could concentrate and specialize in the production of a good or service, which could be traded for others. This created a 'taming' or civilizing effect. We concluded, in the deep, dark genetic boiler rooms, that we no longer needed to burn calories in physical combat to get things we wanted. We could just trade for them.

But, and here's the kicker- there's always the option to walk away from desire. The human brain takes the same lazy route that everything else in nature takes- the path of least resistance. If we want something, we calculate the amount of work, physical or occupational, that it will take to get it. And we compare that to the amount of happiness we can expect to obtain from said object. If an iPod costs 4 days salary, but will bring you years of happiness...well, expect to sell many iPods. BUT- if the work is too risky or exhausting, our brain will rationalize away the desire for the object.

So where am I going with this? Well, I'm suggesting that the novelty of the market would have died out very quickly if it weren't for one very important innovation. At the beginning, it would have been very difficult to incentivize people to work, regardless of how revolutionary some new tools might have been. To get people to accept this new way of life, we had to restrict something. We had to manipulate the first ever market, the market for markets, by locking up the food.

AAAAND HISTORY STARTS....NOW. NO, NOW

There are theories abound regarding exactly when history starts, and what the first "civilization" was. Was it the Sumerians? The Egyptians? Han Chinese hydraulic civilization? Did early cultures in East Africa count as civilizations? Or did red-headed aliens come in boats from across the stars, and kindly fill in our
ancestors on burials, marriage, agriculture and the rest? I'm not really sure which one is right, and I'm not sure it's really that important. What seems relevant to me is that history began when a farmer, with a surplus, first took issue with a less talented person stealing some of his surplus. There had to be a first time for that. Up until that point, theft was...well, theft wasn't. There was no concept of ill-gotten gain, because there had to be a fundamental shift in the idea of property. That's when history started, when someone first said 'Hands off'. From there. it's not hard to extrapolate how war, management, architecture, science, high technology and law evolved into their modern day counterparts. The only 'hard art' that I can think of that took a wholly different path is medicine, and that's mainly because the other disciplines can all refer back to that initial bullshit, whereas medicine has to be less bullshitty. Of course, this refers to actual medicine- life affecting surgery and chemistry.

Anywho, back to the point. I think this is where right wing and left wing begin as well. Of course, the concept of there being a line in the sand between the two is only relevant to post-enlightenment European societies and the people they affected (read: almost everyone). But the fundamental difference begins here: one side believes in ownership, the other side believes in need. Both sides believe in freedom- the concept that one person should have no control over the other. Except that they don't. I'm going to suggest again that one side believes in God, and the other side believes in Apocalypse. But even they're not quite sure which is which.

A SLIPPERY SLOPE

The idea that civilization began is hard to argue with, since everything happens for a first time at some point. But the idea that civilization is a lineal ascension towards the heavens is a little harder to lock down. To begin with, there are bumps in the road. Egyptian civilization was highly sophisticated, but was outmuscled by a mercantile Levantine civilization. That culture had to deal with the simple but quick-learning Hellenes, who grew to enormous sophistication, only to be bamboozled by the proudly prosaic Romans. And so forth. If sophistication is to be equated with a higher capacity for reason and a more egalitarian approach to systemic problems within human societies (poverty, sickness, substance abuse, etc), then it's hard to say we're in the most advanced window even now. Even if one were to take a 'right wing' view that sophistication is measured in terms of personal freedom and direct compensation for work that produces value, it could be easily argued that we've been in better places before.

Ok, but even accounting for bumps in the road, one could say that it's still an ascension. On a line graph, it might look a little jagged, but it still goes up, right? And it's a common academic conceit to say that people conceive of the modern day as being inferior to a golden past, but that really, everything is much better than it used to be. But even looking within the last 200 years, a period in which statistics has become the rigorous discipline we now take it to be, there's no evidence we're going up. The median age at death hasn't budged nearly as much as we think it has, leaps in technology have been enormous, but not proportionally superior to other ages of discovery and innovation, and human health isn't necessarily better as a whole. This isn't being creative with the stats, this is just trying to look at the whole situation.


LOOK, SERIOUSLY, TASTE IT. IT'S GOOD

I remember a friend asking me what "Jewish" means. I grew up in the stable and remarkably self-contained Jewish community of Melbourne, Australia. When i got out of school and into the workforce, I discovered that people who had grown up 30 minutes away by car had no idea what a Jew was, or how Jewish religion and culture was distinct from others.

I tried to think of a novel metaphor to explain how Jewish culture differed from Christian culture, specifically in light of the inevitable question about race, religion and nationality. Actually, the way the conversation went was :

- What nationality are you
- Jewish/American
- No, but nationality
-
I guess Polish.
- What does it mean that you're Jewish?

So how do you answer this without starting from the year dot? Clearly, I have no problem starting from the year dot. But I wanted to see if I could put it into a context my friend could quickly get his head around. So I tried PC vs Mac.

Judaism is similar to Apple. It's a closed system, encompassing a hardware and software model. You can't easily graft Judaism onto another nationality, (which I surmised was my friend's word for what others may call ethnicity) and you can't easily operate another software model onto the Jewish ethnic group. Benjamin Disraeli may have been baptized as a Christian and lived a devout Christian life while serving as a member of parliament and Queen Vic's Prime Minister; but neither he nor his contemporaries could resist labeling him as Jewish. On the flipside, the Khazars, a nomadic central asian kingdom, tried taking up Judaism as an antidote to Christian and Muslim influences in the middle ages. It never caught on with the people.

So, to extend the metaphor, Judaism works for Jewish people, the same way Apple software works best on Apple hardware. Can Apple hardware run other OS's? Sure! But not well. And you can run Apple software on a PC, but why bother? The point seems to get lost. I know this metaphor breaks down in light of more up to date Macs that run Windows well, because the guts are the same as a PC. You could string out the metaphor and say this is analogous with Jewish people becoming more "white", with intermarriage being so high- but Jesus, enough already.

Now, how is Christianity like Microsoft? Well, like Microsoft did with Apple, Christianity took some initial cues from Judaism, but made the format much more open. Christianity pared back some functionality to allow for more open market readiness. They took away the hardware compatibility issue, by making it so that you didn't have to be ethnically Jewish, and you didn't need to be circumcised. They took away some of the more restrictive software elements, by eliminating dietary regulations and strict guidelines regarding the Sabbath. They kept a lot of the cool stuff- the all-powerful God, the asceticism- and added some killer apps of their own. Most spectacularly, they added the idea of Salvation. That's the killer app of Christianity, the way documentation is the killer app of Windows, and e-mail is the killer app of the internet. It adds something so fundamental to the mix, that other cultures started to budget in Christianity as a necessary expense. Because Hell is as bad as the competition being quicker and more organized than you are, and as bad as being unable to communicate quickly where others can.

In this metaphor, companies like HP, Gateway, Dell, Acer, Asus...they start to look like the Greeks, the Romans, the Gauls, the Teutons...they were hardware folk who paid a license to adopt a great system and graft it onto their 'hardware' cultures- the license fee being a tithe to a centralized church. Sometimes the fit was imperfect, so things got adjusted, cottage industries were started to smooth over the differences...think of Adobe and Java and Cisco, and then think of the fragmentation of the European Christian landscape. Think of all the Sony software you get on your desktop with a new Vaio, and then think of Christmas trees, Yule logs, easter rabbits and other conventions that fit with ancient European cultures, but have nothing to do with the New Testament.

So what's the relevance of this long detour? The civilization that we live in now, with it's fundamentals in Christianity and agriculture, is based on the concept of "what we have is very good, and we recommend you take it up as well". It's hard to argue with that logic, because...here we are! Obviously, our ancestors thought it was good, because they took it up. This culture then, must be superior to cultures it supplanted!

That approach should work with Microsoft as well. It's on 95% of machines around the world. Apple, by comparison, is a minnow. So why does Apple inspire such loyalty? And why are Apple fans sometimes portrayed as being brain-dead zombies suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, trapped into an ecosystem that sucks their wallets dry, while Windows users can blaze a free trail? Because of bullshit.

Look, I'm not saying Apple is better, or that Judaism is better, or anything like that. That's not really the conversation here. But one thing to point out- Microsoft got it's market power with clever legal, marketing and licensing tricks. It's underlying product was excellent; but soon, that wasn't as important as how well it could lock you in with sophisticated deals.

Christianity has things to recommend it over Judaism, and for that fact, most other faith software. The idea of Grace, the concept of a (new) covenant with God, and the idea that you're pre-damned, and need to work towards Salvation- these are exciting, world beating innovations. That got the ball rolling. That allowed the Church to enter the spiritual market. But it was their vertical integration- the idea of Christian governments and Christian armies- that allowed them to win market dominance. And after a while, that was the source of their power, not their spiritual innovation. Meanwhile, The Jews carried on, with their own civilization in the background, borrowing bits and lending bits as they went, occasionally beaten down in the market (very beaten down), but staying true to a closed system that only changed on their terms. Other groups weren't so lucky. Some died out in body and spirit, others in spirit only. A big heap joined the party to the extent that they became the party. It's like how "Roman" once meant people from the city and region of Rome, then came to mean people who adopted Roman culture, then came to mean the Greek Christians in Byzantium, then came to mean a plurality of Germans.

So what's the problem here? Christianity isn't really what this long, tired rant is all about. In a way, it's a minority player now too; a supporting act. The real star of the show here is the whole industry of Markets. The idea of trade and rewarding value and merit. This idea, a spectacular, world changing idea, is what's really at stake. And if History began with the idea of property, it may be at a fundamentally precarious point right now. A confused point, where the left and right are more divided than ever, but where fundamental meanings are clouded in a fog of bullshit. Where corporations, which mimic governments, are champions of the right, and where progressive innovators are champions of the left. Where faith, mystery and personal peccadilloes are right wing stalwarts, while firm handshakes, clear visions and operational efficiency are left-wing causes. How did we get this way? What did World War 2 have to do with it? And at what point does right-wing anarchy meet left-wing anarchy to make...anarchy?

Next up: Modern Bullshit and Bullshit of the Future




Sunday, February 14, 2010

Ranto! Part One: Cavemen!

SOMETHING TO CRO ABOUT

So about 200,000 years ago, evolution had narrowed the "homo" strain down to two strong species: Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. There were probably some human-ish types in Indonesia and other remote communities (remote from Eastern Africa, that is), but they're no longer around today, and it's unlikely they found their way into the homo sapien line.

Neanderthals were about 5 feet tall, wide, pretty hairy and pretty clever. They had large hearts and brains (physically I mean) and they buried their dead. They probably had some language, and they probably used fire to cook with. They were probably much stronger than modern humans, and with their big chests came big lungs- they could probably track game for a long, long time. They infrequently settled, and they never seemed to engage in agriculture, at least not dedicated agriculture. They never seemed to acquire a taste for fermented things, so they probably never came across wine, cheese or bread, and they needed a lot of fresh meat. They probably had high infant mortality rates, but if they survived childhood, they likely lived well into their 70's. They lived in Saharan Africa, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Most of Europe and Central Asia. They don't seem to have gotten much further than that.

Cro-Magnon were as tall as modern humans. In fact, Cro-Magnon were modern humans. I doubt they did battle with the neanderthals. They probably interbred with them, but as they were faster and cleverer (big asterisk- see next paragraph), they probably just pushed them out and monopolized their food supply. Cro-Magnon genes got passed along, neanderthal ones largely did not. No mystery there.

Cro-Magnon didn't have neanderthal's stamina. So they were forced by necessity to become more efficient hunters. I should point out, I don't think they were cleverer per se- I think they were just physically weaker and were therefore required to become cleverer. I think both species possessed the same capacity for ingenuity, but Neanderthal never had to progress much beyond hunter-gathering to survive in the long term, and the short term encroachment of Cro-Magnon was both too quick and too subtle for them to respond to effectively.

Cro-Magnon lived in tribes: closely bound groups, mostly kin, where survival was determined by how best to survive, and set rules were entirely anathema. What good is a set rule if it isn't working? I don't mean to suggest that life was a constant battle without time for discussion or debate- the opposite. I think that's all life really was. A few hours a day to secure food, then the rest was sleep, sex, socializing and play time. Traditions only came about when they were necessary and they worked.

Of course, early on, they would have realized that they couldn't afford to stay to themselves for long. Interbreeding is one of those things that probably made a lot of sense at first glance ("But she's right there!") but we wouldn't be here if they didn't figure out that they needed to talk to other tribes and organize some cross-territory hot-boning. That worked out nicely, because the by-product was alliances with other groups. And another nice by-product was Trade.

YOU HAVE CARROTS? WE WERE GONNA MAKE CARROT CAKE! OH THIS IS NICE.

Trade is awesome. Tribesman A and Tribesman B are watching their kids get married. Tribesman A mentions that they have shitloads of carrots. Tribesman B sighs. They'd like some carrots. All they have is abundant skins of water. Tribesman A moans. Man, they could really go some water.

Then a chocolate truck crashes into a peanut butter truck, and lo, the Peanut Butter Cup was born.

This is really cool: there's been no unequal gain- the same amount of goods is still present in the room, but the amount of happiness has increased several-fold. Og has carrots, Bill has water- and no-one had to kill anyone else to better their lot! Who needs theft, murder and rape when you have trade? And best of all, at the end of the day, we can go back to our camps, and we don't have to "get all up in each other's faces".

TOTALLY CEREAL

Well, this is almost exactly how it worked for a long time. I don't mean to imply it was all hunky-dory- it was probably difficult, though no moreso, relatively, to working 8 or 10 hours a day in an office. The main thing is that the child mortality rate was pretty high. Few made it past 5 years, but the ones who did, lived as long as we do now. And they had skirmishes too. Frequently. With neighbouring tribes, amongst themselves- maybe as often as every week. But they weren't wars of destruction, they were mostly preventative clashes to establish that each tribe had a claim to be there, the strength to back that up, and the will to use it. And even that standoff would be put on hold once there was something to trade.

In this set-up, calories came from hunted meat and gathered vegetables. Probably a 50-50 split. But whereas gathering took quite a few calories to perform, hunting took A LOT of calories. Since these dudes were semi-nomadic, camping down for a number of weeks at a time before moving on, they probably knew about wheat. It grew wildly. They probably knew that if cut at a certain time, they could get some fat, juicy kernels out of a stalk. And over time, they probably saw what happened when you crushed those kernels up into a paste and baked it. You got damper. Let the mix rot for a bit before you bake it, and you get bread. And bread was totally tits.

We're at about 10,000 years ago now. 8000 BCE.

One tribe decided to put aside hunting for a bit, and to concentrate on this bread dealio for a while. They got expert at it. It was seriously hard work, but the long-term payoffs were big. They had a surplus of food after a while. Which meant they didn't eat all their vegetables and milk straight away, since they had other food available...and once they were allowed to rot a bit, wine and cheese came next. Then preservation, which had been an amateur sport til then, went pro. Because you have all this food now, that you can control yourself...cant let it go to waste! And hey, we have excess food...so wolves hang out with us, and whaddya know- they're not bad to have around, once food is available (that isn't in the form of our young children). And hey! excess food can be fed to other animals, like reindeer and oxen and goats...so they stick around, and we have lots more milk available! And now we can/have to build more permanent settlements. That'll require more tools, and more tools means small jobs get done quicker, and we can turn to bigger jobs meaning bigger tools, and so on...

THE FALL (?)

Depending on your viewpoint, this was either the most glorious moment in human history, or the start of the end. The plus sides seem self-evident: with more food and permanency, our kids live longer, and we have more need for and access to, tools. That's about the end of the up side. The other stuff- we get bigger and more well fed, we have to work less, we get wiser- that's not really true. We're on the whole no taller, smarter, stronger, or healthier than we were before the agricultural revolution.

The downside is pretty big. We develop fear of the future for the first time. I'm sure hunter-gatherers know fear. But I doubt an idea of "the future" ever came to them- Life is now, and it'll be now tomorrow, and it was now yesterday, too. They know time passes, but it doesn't pass towards anything, it just passes.

Farmers, meanwhile, know full well that time passes, and that it may not be in their favour. Without a good harvest, things will be very bad indeed. They're going to agonize over that.

There's a weakness in this part of the theory- surely the hunter-gatherers knew to measure time in human physical development, and in seasons. I'm sure they did. But I'm not convinced that those things brought enormous fear. Maybe winter, for the sheer difficulty. But not the same way it would have struck doubt and fear into a farmer, who knew that he had locked himself into a system of producing food that was completely fucked over by lack of sunlight and water. A hunter gatherer can still go hunting in winter. Tough, but not impossible.

But the farmer has preserves of food! But the hunter gatherer has those as well. But the farmer has more, because he has a house, and he can store more than he can carry! True. That part is true. It just means the hunter gatherer has to limit how many people can be in his tribe. The farmer can wile away those winter nights, 6 inches deep in moist farm-wife, knowing that while he builds his stocks of food in the harvest months, he builds his stocks of more farmers in the winter.

More downside. Jealousy, violence and stress. The farmer has toiled very hard for his food. Very hard. Much harder than the hunter gatherer! Losing his food- be it to fire, plague, locusts, theft, foxes, whatever- is going to hurt awful bad. So he stresses over it. How to store it. How to protect it. How to ensure that no-one else gets it. Sure enough, that's going to require some very powerful, high strung and violent genes to succeed in that environment. So that's what the farmwives are going to pick. Of course, you'll also need some very talented and clever genes too. So that becomes part of the equation as well. What do the Hunter-Gatherers need? Well, realistically, they'll need violence, strength and cleverness too. But a different cleverness, and a different violence. This part is hard to pin down, but I think the hunter gathers were sexually selective towards co-operation, and farmers for competition. Make of that conclusion what you will: I'm still trying to get my head around it.

But sure enough- when the farmers started to multiply- and they did, very quickly- they had no time or patience for hunter-gatherers on "their land". And they had very good tools to deal with interactions.

Of course, the poor shmuck hunter gatherers probably thought someone owning land was totes retarded (if they bothered to think about it at all), and ignored warnings from the farmers to bugger off. They weren't stubborn, they were probably just bemused.

If someone started yelling at you to stop blueing his peaches, would you quickly get out of the way, or would you kinda stop and say "what are you on about?". Of course, you could hazard a guess at what's making this guy so upset, and you could try to work out in what way you had blued his peach, but in the meantime, he's used some wicked awesome scythe to chop your head off.

And after a while, even the dudes who had learned to just get out of the way of these high-strung farmers, pretty soon discovered that all the way had done been gotten out...of. So hunter gatherers were soon driven to those places so remote and hostile that you couldn't even grow a seed on it, and stuck around until many centuries later, when a farmer decided that there was something in that area that was needed back home for that ongoing competition with other farmers. Be it rubber, or tobacco, or sugar or whatever. And before you know it...no more hunter gatherers.

I'M JUST GOING TO BITE AIR, LIKE THIS

I like mythology and legend. They're like little knowing references to history. And the more obscure, the better. Like when someone makes a pie, and you make a Simpsons reference by saying "Now Jim, don't you eat this pie..." It's a random quote, but it calls on the shared experience that you and Jim had of the episode where Bart and Lisa are on different hockey teams, they start fighting, and Marge goes to check on them, tells Homer not to eat the pie, and en route to surreptitiously eating it (by "biting air"), Homer smashes his head. FUNNY.

Of course, if Jim has never seen the Simpsons, he wouldn't get the subtext, and contextually he'd be like "fuck you dicknose, It's my pie". (Of course, his "dicknose" reference would suggest he's seen Teen Wolf, so let's not judge Jim too harshly, even though he is a pie-eating-no-simpsons-watching motherfucker).

If Jim knows that episode, he cracks up. You've strengthened the pair bond, by saying "hey! we like and know the same things! Marry my sister!" NICE.

Ok, so back to mythology. Mythology of itself is like this big debate, this big reasoning. All these early folks kinda know that they used to be hunter-gatherers, and that life was different. So they form this way of short-handing this difficult concept:

Flood myths- there were humans, but something happened, and those humans were wiped out, and we're like, "new humans".

Gilgamesh- The great-grandfather of our people had a brother, whom he really loved. But the brother was wild, and great-grandfather had to destroy him. But he feels totes bad about it.

Golden Age- Those old humans were really cool. We're Silver Age humans. We're also cool. Not quite as cool. *Sniff*

Paradise- Life used to be really great, when we lived in this nice, walled, apple orchard. Then we discovered something, and we lost that, and now we're out in the wilderness, always toiling.

Cain and Abel- The farmer and the herdsman were brothers. Sky father preferred the herdsman's lifestyle, and the farmer, in his jealous rage, killed his brother. Then he refused to own up to it, and now he's cursed.

Pandora/Eve- Things were good when we didn't know. But we got curious and tried to find out. We found out, but now we can't un-know.

NOW WHAT?

So here we are. We're at about 6000 BC. Farmers have been around a while, and after a lot of hard work, they're pretty much alone, with the hunter gatherers and tribal types on the fringes. Of course, the farmers are hunter-gatherers too, and 2000 years or so of sexual selection doesn't quite stand up to 200,000 years of tribal sexual selection. They don't have it out of their system yet. So they congregate in weird tribes. Inter-competitive tribes. Catal Huyuk, in Turkey was an early one. Jericho was another. These are some of the first cities, in a context we can understand today. Not villages or settlements, but a collection of non-related families, collected near a water source and easily defended ground, where labour is specialized and trade is ever-flowing. All this supported by a geologically close agricultural sector, just outside the boundaries of the city. It's not a tribe, exactly, but it works almost as well as tribes have for 200,000 years. And in many ways, better.

We're at this point because of some very ground breaking ideas. They are:

1. We want freedom from powers beyond our control.
2. We love our children as individuals, not as an ambiguous "next generation".
3. Work is virtuous, and what I earn is mine alone.

If those things sound perfectly reasonable in context, don't be alarmed. That's because you're descended from farmers. Here, more or less, is the exact opposite conclusion:

1. We want to leave the power over life and death to the Gods.
2. An individual child is not as important as the overall health of the tribe.
3. Work, for it's own sake, is totally shit. And screw your rights, I want what you have

If you thought these things all the time, you'd be thought of as backwards, cruel and lazy. If that seems about right to you...again, don't be alarmed.

Here's my take: neither of these viewpoints is right or wrong, because the world doesn't actually work like that. Both work a little bit. Both can be made to work in the long term. But one method has been around for a lot longer than the other.

To put it another way: Let's assume two men want freedom.

One man envisions being able to walk completely unencumbered by anything, completely naked, through the wilderness, hunting and eating only when he needs to. He doesn't worry about the future, because he knows he has no power over it.

The other man worries about the future. He worries it will be really bad unless he plans for it. So he encumbers himself with weapons, clothes and provisions. He goes traipsing off into the wilderness, eating and hunting to a schedule, to ensure he can get through the bad times that he knows full well is just around the corner.

Let's say it another way. One man believes in God. The other believes in Apocalypse.

That's where I'm going to leave this for now. I should point out: I don't believe in socialism, I value the individual over the group, I believe in freedom and I really like science and machines. I don't believe man is flawed, and I don't believe women are sneaky or evil. I also don't believe in God, or at least, I don't believe in a beardy giant man who lives on a mountain and is concerned about what I eat or whom I shtup.

Because think about it. That's retarded.

Next: Ye Olde Times!



Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Ranto! Introduction

I think the arch of my intellectual inquiry has taken a typical route; as a youngster, I was hooked on mythology. Then came Jurassic Park in 1993 and I turned my attention to dinosaurs and natural history. With high school came a fascination with classical music, comic books and ancient history. A chance purchase of a book about freemasonry when I was 19 lead to a long fascination with that subject, which fed on my existing love of history and mythology. When I was 21, I picked a political side, unsurprisingly leftish, and began investigating liberal causes- globalization, the downside of civilization, anthropomorphic climate change, abuse of labour markets, and so on.

Religion has always been a big thing too. I was brought up in Melbourne's cozily incestuous Jewish community, where everyone knows everyone and that girl you have a crush on might very well be your cousin. I went to Jewish schools and had a passing competency in all things religious, from Hebrew to texts and traditions. But it was only after high school that I started to become interested in Jewish civilization, Christianity and the wider world of religious belief. This probably co-incided with my first attempts to get into the pants of someone who wasn't possibly a cousin.

Back to politics. I became vegetarian for a while after reading Fast Food Nation. I read all of Daniel Quinn's books, and still agree with his basic hypothesis- man has been tribal for a lot longer than he's been urban, and that exclusive agriculture was probably a mistake. I even read The Communist Manifesto, but even my soft, impressionable brain found it a bit eye rolling.

When I was 24, I picked up a copy of The Economist, because Time had become a sadly predictable rag, cycling through the following 4 topics every month: Iraq, DNA, How bread can kill you, and new speculation into the gayness of long dead US presidents. Not that those things are uninteresting (Hahding wuz a queeah), but I was just sick of seeing a double helix graphic on every second cover. The Economist was a refreshing change, and with Fox News already setting the ungracious tone for political discourse all around the world, I needed something that actually seemed fair and balanced. I was impressed by the depth of reporting, the sparseness of the editorializing, and the anonymity of authorship (there are no bylines). I studied the Economist style guide, and I subscribe to the audio edition, where I get to hear it read in clipped Queen's English by men and women with syrupy voices. I listen to/read most of it, though I blank out during the Asian and African sections. Get more interesting, Asia and Africa!

So I began to expand on my political knowledge. I did an Open University course on International Politics, to get a handle of the basics. I read Atlas Shrugged, which is a valuable read if you want to know where the radical right gets it's talking points and attitudes from. My dad, a far more avid novel-reader than I, had always pushed me to read some Ayn Rand. I know why now- her ideas are thought provoking, compelling and utter shit. It doesn't take a particularly keen mind to put two and two together- she was a homely Jewish-Russian girl, whose family was persecuted for being middle class. She became a fierce advocate for meritocracies, talent, patriarchy, competition, weird sex and disturbingly, a fetishist for tall, fair, Germanic physical qualities. I'm not going to suggest she was a self-hating jew (I don't think her ethnic heritage was really part of the conversation), but she definitely seemed to buy into the master race ideology.

So this brings me to the subject of markets. Also, the left-right divide, the culture war, the end of history, the new world civil-war and what it is that bothers me so much about the world we live in.

I'm not good at due diligence. I won't make any footnotes or references. I'll paraphrase. to sidetrack for a moment- I read an interesting idea recently, that western philosophy has always taken a hypothesis-antithesis-synthesis approach, in contrast with say, the Jewish approach to debate- hypothesis-antithesis-antithesis-antithesis approach. In a nutshell, this means that goyim like a result and Jews like to sit around and argue. I don't think either group would quickly deny that, but for rebuttals to this crackpot hypothesis you'd have to speak to their respective leaders; Queen Elizabeth for the goyim and Boss Jew Herschel "Hank" Rosenblatt of Teaneck, NJ.

So yeah, I'm looking for an argument here. I don't expect any real conclusive answers, because we're talking about history, government, the market and human endeavour. These are fluid things that we live in, not fixed things that can be readily observed and quantified. I'm really just putting out ideas and observations here, to put my thought processes on paper and make sense of it all.

I'm not looking to synthesize a Grand Unified Theory of everything, because through early cultural osmosis I picked up a wise-alecky, stubborn, stiff necked tendency to immediately switch positions on something once it has been conclusively settled on. I suppose I am suggesting that this is something that has been baked into my thick, garlicky jewish blood. Basically, if I ask for chicken, and you agree that chicken is the meal of the day, I will then argue why fish is better. For one thing, it's healthier. And what, you no like fish?

This post is just an introduction, while I form a cogent argument for my next post. I'm going to try and take a chronological approach, because a) it helps me and b) it'll help me workshop some ideas for a book I'm trying to draft. It's also easier.

I'm also going to steal ideas without giving their originators their proper due. Thankfully, no-one is reading this.

Next: Cavemen!